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With the financial services and professional sectors of our economy absorbing most of our young and highly qualified graduates, essential everyday vocations such as plumbing, electricians, mechanics and builders are becoming scarce.
At the present rate, a qualified plumber with basic engineering knowledge could be in greater demand than a neurosurgeon, a forensic accountants or even a corporate lawyer, jobs that are fast becoming a dime a dozen.
Unless something is done at the high school and university level, we will end up importing all of our skilled labour, as shown by the current trend of labourers from eastern Europe and Asia, most of whom are either unqualified or don’t speak the language, or both, resulting in shoddy work and poor workmanship.
The only way to tackle this problem is by reforming education to suit the needs of the economy and society in general. By the nature of all things in civil service in Cyprus, the public education sector has been overwhelmed by the trade unions’ desire to control everything and enforce a status quo on all aspects, simply to ensure job security.
How else can one explain the growing frustration among technical school teachers who belong to a small, lesser noisy union than the dominant teachers’ union?
Plans are reportedly underway to reform the technical education and merge both bodies of teachers into one force, while many of the technical schools will be closed and integrated into the growing network of the 6-year unified lyceums.
Although many argue that the creation of the Technical University of Cyprus is probably the second best thing after the establishment of the University of Cyprus nearly two decades ago, TEPAK is merely a technical higher institution offering applied sciences. There is no doubt that we need such an institution, but we seem to have ignored the other needs of our society as education has evolved drastically in recent years with some technical subjects clearly separated into theoretical and practical areas.
The fact that the quota system of entry into TEPAK and the TEI technical colleges in Greece, or even the Evelpidon military academy favours technical school graduates does not seem to have caught on yet, but should be promoted as an incentive for young school leavers to seek a vocational career with guaranteed income and employment opportunities, as was the case with the Higher Technical Institute in its glory days.
Some (if not all) of the money from the Human Resources Training Authority reserved for retraining adult workers who are laid off in industry should also be directed to more technical programmes having first identified the future labour needs that could some day make the Cyprus economy competitive yet again. Otherwise, even the most menial job of a tyre change will require advanced linguistic skills in order to specify what brand and type of replacement is required.
